Around 500B.C. there lived a famous
Greek philosopher by the name of Pythagoras. His sect of
followers were influential during the classic Greek era in
southern Italy in a place called Crotone. The Pythagoreans taught
that the planets (including an Anti-Earth on the other side of
the Sun), the Moon, and the Sun were fastened on great spheres of
crystal, rotating around a central fire. The motion of these
great spheres was believed to create an exquisite harmony of the
spheres which ordinary people cannot hear because they are too
used to it. Pythagoras and his followers believed they could tune
instruments by geometrical calculations so the instruments would
resonate with the spheres. Dancing to the music of the spheres
was an activity that occupied much of the time of the ancient
Pythagoreans.

In today's world there are people who
still believe they can hear the Pythagorean music of the spheres.
A group called ProZodiac has taken the work of the Pythagoreans
and built an astrology program on it. There are also people who
are attempting to predict the end of the world on the basis of
planetary alignments and the miraculous impact such alignments
are claimed to have on human affairs. Those attempting to find
proof of the end of time in the year 2000 are pointing to a
partial planetary alignment that will occur late in that year
which they claim to be a vehicle of destruction.

All of these kind of claims and beliefs
would be funny if it was not for the ignorance of people that
allows these beliefs to be influential. Heavens Gate is the most
recent tragic reminder of how destructive this ignorance can be.
Although the vehicle that Marshal Applewaite and his followers
were using was a comet, the same kind of problem existed--people
did not have enough information to understand the impossibility
of Applewaite's claims.

From a scientific standpoint the dance
of the spheres is understandable and the music to which the
spheres dance is loud and clear. Our solar system moves with
definite rhythms, following a musical score written with
incredible precision and purpose. As our knowledge and
understanding has improved, the incredible complexity of both the
music and the dance has become clear. Newton gave us the original
score and Einstein fine tuned it, but both created their
understandings by looking at the grand design. We have now seen
that moons help hold planets with a proper tilt, that the large
Jovian planets help shield the inner planets from intruders, and
that the very substance of which we are made is remarkable both
in its make up and origin.

Dean Overman in his book A Case
Against Accident and Self Organization has shown the fallacy
of trying to explain all we see in the cosmos by chance. Thomas
Huxley once said that a large number of monkeys typing on a large
number of typewriters would eventually produce the complete works
of William Shakespeare. Overman shows that a section from Macbeth
containing 12 lines would have a probability of 26 to the 379th
power. Mathematicians consider anything with a probability of 10
to the 50th power as a mathematical impossibility. Paul Davies
equates the odds of one chance in 10 to the 60th power as the
chance of hitting a one-inch target with a random shot of a
bullet from a distance of 20 billion light years.

The dance of the spheres and the music to which it moves is
not what Pythagoras thought, but it is very real and speaks to us
in beautiful ways about our own design and purpose.